On Linguistic Structure of Evaluative Meaning in Czech

The project is aimed at the area of pragmatics, namely at various ways of expressing evaluative meaning in Czech. Evaluative language is a type of meaning expression which applies across different genres, from everyday conversation up to scientific discourse. Though there are many resources of evaluative texts, and corpus linguistics offers both data and tools to handle it, there is still lack of systematic approaches to Czech evaluative language. We will observe the ways the evaluative meaning is modelled in Czech using means from different layers of linguistic description. We will describe the mutual interaction of lexical and structural meaning and the role of specific areas of research, such as valency or idiomatics in the system of evaluative expressions. Moreover, we will be interested in the influence of text domain on the choice of language means. The formulated linguistic hypotheses will be tested using natural language processing methods, and the resulting model will be compared to other available language models, namely English.

The main goal of the project is to build a complex and coherent model of evaluative language, based on a thorough analysis of Czech
evaluative texts from annotated corpora, and to verify this model by means of natural language processing (NLP) methods.